What is a Xarelto Lawsuit Advance?

If you are involved with the pending Xarelto class action lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson and Bayer, you may be eligible for a pre-settlement advance. Because class action and multi-district litigation lawsuit generally take years, if not decades, to mature through the life-cycle, a pre-settlement advance, more commonly referred to as a lawsuit loan or legal funding, can provide plaintiffs with cash before their settlement is awarded. The injuries and side effects sustained and suffered by those claimants who took Xarelto have caused many to miss work and fall behind on bills.

What is a Xarelto?

Rivaroxaban is an oral anticoagulant (blood thinner) medication that is commonly used to prevent blood clots. Developed originally by Bayer, a German multinational pharmaceutical and life sciences company, Rivaroxaban was patented in the United States in 2007 and approved for medical use by 2011. It would be sold under the brand name Xarelto and brought to market by Janssen Pharmaceutica, Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical unit and Bayer HealthCare unit.

Xarelto was designed to help patients in risk of deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a life-threatening condition in which blood clots form under one’s skin cells. These blood clots can eventually travel to the heart or brain with the potential of causing a stroke, brain damage and even death.

What did Xarelto Replace?

Xarelto was intended to replace Warfarin, which came into commercial use in 1948 as a rat poison and would be approved for medical use as a blood thinner by 1954. Warfarin is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines, a list thatcontains the medications considered to be most effective and safe to meet the most important needs in a health system.

Warfarin treatment can help prevent formation of future blood clots while helping to reduce the risk of embolism, i.e. the migration of a blood clot to a place where it can block blood supply to a vital organ. Since the middle of the 20th century, Warfarin has been the standard drug used for treating patients with blood clots.

That said, Warfarin has its drawbacks, including dietary intake of vitamin K, drug-drug interactions, genetics, age, and concurrent medical conditions. As you can gather, there is much variability in the optimal dose between different patients, and even within the same patient at different times. If not constantly monitored, a patient can not be under-anticoagulated, leading to a risk of thrombosis, or, be over-anticoagulated, leading to an increased risk of bleeding.

For these reasons, over the next several decades, many other anticoagulant medicines were introduced. When Xarelto was introduced to the medical world, Janssen Pharma advertised it as an improvement because patients would not require close monitoring. In an early television commercial, Janssen would exclaim,

Xarelto is the first and only once a day prescription blood thinner for patients with A-fib not caused by a heart valve problem that does not require routine blood monitoring, so Jim is not tied to that monitoring routine.

Xarelto Dangers & Side Effects

Common side effects include bloody, black or tar-like bowel movements, blood in urine, coughing up blood, vomiting blood, nosebleeds, bleeding gums, weakness, tiredness, fainting, dizziness, blurry vision, arm pain, leg pain among the following:

• Internal abdominal bleeding
• Significant reduction in platelet levels
• Abnormal or faulty liver functionality
• Serious brain hemorrhage (bleeding inside the brain)
• Uncontrollable and excessive bleeding
• Bleeding from the rectum
• Wrongful death
• Fainting, bruising, and soft tissue damage

Unfortunately, unlike its counterparts, Xarelto lacks an antidote that can thicken the blood to reverse the effect of blood thinning and thus can be extremely dangerous and in some cases deadly. In addition, results from more recent studies failed to show sought-after benefits, falling short of trial goals and, in the process, weighing on the drugmakers’ efforts to expand use of the drug.

In the first study, Xarelto did not significantly reduce the risk of a composite endpoint of symptomatic venous thromboembolism (VTE) or VTE-related death versus placebo. In the second study, data would show Xarelto to have no significant benefit on death from any cause, heart attack or stroke compared to placebo.

Additionally, the New England Journal of Medicine study showed that in patients with atrial fibrillation, Xarelto was found to be no more effective than Warfarin in combating blood clots and strokes. The study also found that patients who took Xarelto experienced more internal abdominal bleeding than patients prescribed with Warfarin.

If you are interested in learning more about the Xarelto trial, multi-district litigation, mass tort, and global settlement, please click to educate yourself..